[SOLVED] Gnome Volume Manager stopped working!

[Theophile]

I had GVM working fine when I originally got GNOME set up on my Dell laptop. It was great to plug in a flash drive and have it automount and an icon appear on the desktop. But after some upgrades, it has ceased to work. Here's what I know:

I have hotplug, udev, dbus, and hald all installed and running. I have gnome-vfs and gnome-voulme-manager compiled with the hal flag, although gnome-volume-manager does not seem to have that use flag as an option. Should this concern me?

[Knute]

http://www.togaware.com/linux/survivor/Using_Gnome_Volume_Manager.html
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Knute
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The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.
-- Mark Twain

If you want proof of that, take a look at windows sometime.

[Theophile]

I appreciate the help, but that link doesn't really seem to address my problem. My user is a member of plugdev, I have no entries in /etc/fstab that would override the pmount policies, and I have 'gnome-volume-manager' running and starting with the GNOME session.

That being said, the portion of the article that discusses pmount was interesting. If I do 'strings /usr/bin/gnome-volume-manager | grep pmount' as the article suggests, it returns nothing. What's more, pmount was not even present on my system. However, even after emerging pmount (with hal USE flag) and re-emerging gnome-volume-manager, it is still not doing anything.
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Monopedilos

[Theophile]

Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Would like to get it working again.

TIA!
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Monopedilos

[juniper]

what gnome are you using? i am using 2.16 and pmount IS installed. maybe you should try and install it? another thing: have you tried to log out of gnome and log back in? give the following a try: log out of gnome, restart dbus (which should restart hald, do it manually if it doesn't) and log back in.

I used to have an issue with G-V-M after a wake up from sleep, but it seems to be good now. i wonder if you are having the same issue?

[Theophile]

I am using GNOME 2.18, but I had the same problem with 2.16 before the upgrade.

This install in on a laptop and has been rebooted many, many times. dbus and hald start at boot, gnome-volume-manager starts with the GNOME session.
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Monopedilos

[juniper]

kill gvm and restart it from the command line. see if it gives any errors when you plug in a usb drive.

[Theophile]

I killed gnome-volume-manager and restarted it and while it runs, it does not outplut anything to the console. Even when I run 'gnome-volume-manager --daemon yes' nothing is output to the console. However, as soon as I start it, a notification pops up that 99% of the space is used on my iPod. However, it still will not automount any devices.
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Monopedilos

[Dirk.R.Gently]

The devices are mount though correct, you can see them mounted where you've told fstab to mount them?!

[Theophile]

No, the devices do not mount unless I manually use the 'mount' command.
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Monopedilos

[Theophile]

Okay, I finally got GVM to print debug info.

Here's what it says when I plug in my USB drive:

[Theophile]

Okay, here's what happens when I insert an SD card into my card reader:

[Theophile]

Any ideas? What tells gnome-volume-manager whether a device is mountable or not? What sets the "ignore" flag? Who would know this?
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Monopedilos

[Theophile]

I actually solved this one pretty easily. Once I looked in /usr/share/hal/fdi/ I found that, apparently, gparted was installed on my system during the huge world update and gparted inserts a hal policy which explicitly disables automounting. All I had to do was delete that policy and things were back to normal.

Thanks!
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Monopedilos

[dunkirk]

Thanks for initiating this thread, and (more importantly) posting your solution. I have been having the exact same issue. What was even more frustrating for me is that I have a laptop configured almost exactly like my desktop, and it was NOT having this issue. I wasted almost a whole day of my time trying a new kernel, new versions of hal and udev, recompiling gnome-volume-manager et. al., and even going so far as an ``emerge -ae pmount'' to get everything I thought I might be missing. I've been diff'ing kernel .config's, and comparing debug logs from hal. It was clear that the problem was in hal somewhere, but I was surely missing it.

I tried doing a ``equery b /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/gparted-disable-automount.fdi'' and came up with nothing, so it must have been a leftover from a previous version of gparted. My laptop didn't have this, even though I have gparted installed there as well.

There needs to be a good way to delete this sort of cruft. It's only just now, after running my desktop on Gentoo for about 3 years now that I'm noticing this kind of thing getting in the way. I think I can do it manually, but I have seen some stuff out there that other people have written. I just have a hard time trusting such things. :-)

Again, THANK YOU. I was going out of my mind on this one.
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Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."

[star.dancer]

Thanks so much for this tip! I am adding it to the gnome-volume-manager HOWTO

edit: I added it and somebody removed it... go figure.